Coaching junior athletes is more complex and fraught than coaching adults. Children and teenagers can be remarkable athletes capable of making enormous progress extremely quickly. Lucky is the mountain biker who gets their start in the sport at a young age. But coaching the up and coming child athlete is a perilous proposition as we will see. As we age and gain experience in mountain biking we are better equipped to self analyze and less prone to seeing ourselves through a lens of black and white. We compare ourselves to our peers less and less. We are better at receiving wisdom from many sources and integrating nuance into our outlook on training and racing. We have more hard workouts and races under out belts so we can shake off a poor performance more quickly and easily. Our egos become less attached to our results and performance. We have been humbled and chastened by life’s hard lessons. We become much better at risk analysis and suffer fewer injury related setbacks. There are a lot of benefits to being an older athlete!
Junior athletes enjoy a lot of perks for sure: Children and teenagers have a remarkable capacity to recover quickly following difficult workouts. They often have less aversion to risk and are willing to readily attempt difficult challenges. They heal more quickly from injuries. Their developing brains have loads of elasticity which makes them capable of progressing much quicker than adults. This is a socially competitive age, often junior athletes are highly competitive amongst each other and as such are motivated and hungry to improve. Lifestyle choices have far less impact on their young bodies, poor sleep hygiene and a diet full of junk food will not impact them negatively to the same degree it will when they are adults. It is common for a teenager to go from rookie to expert in a single season. Many 17-18 year olds are competing at close to a pro level after a few years competing in the sport. Good luck to the 30+ athlete who can pull that off!
The pitfalls of being a junior athlete, however, are numerous. Many promising athletes quit the sport before realizing their potential and before developing an outlook and practice habits that prime them for longevity. No matter how skilled they are at a young age ALL junior athletes are inexperienced. That is the nature of being young. Juniors are much more prone to burnout, exhaustion, injury, overtraining, poor lifestyle choices, over-confidence in their abilities, difficulty with goal setting, difficulty with self-reflexion, fragile self esteem, an all or nothing mentality towards training and racing, and a lack of perspective which makes set backs much more difficult to rebound from. Because of this performance and results are often erratic, and feeling pressure can turn a fun hobby very un-fun very fast. In the past mountain biking was a fringe activity and there weren’t many people, especially kids, participating in it. That has changed. Mountain biking is mainstream and most places have middle school and high school mountain bike racing programs. That means the talent pool is enormous and extremely competitive. A coach’s job is not to push children to their breaking point in the hopes that they will climb to the top of this very tall pyramid. Rather they must nurture and temper their undeveloped instincts in order to plant the seeds of life long learning and longevity.
Let’s take a look at a case study, myself, starting 25 years ago, and how 42 year old Coach Pete would approach working with teenage Petey with the benefit of hindsight:
The year 2000 was a breakout season for me. I began cross country mountain bike racing in 1997 when I was 14. I was already a very good rider and rose quickly through the ranks of the junior field. In 1999 I got my junior expert NORBA license and began working with a coach and saw some haphazard results turn into pretty good consistent results, including a 4th place finish to end the season at the first Colorado high school state championship race that October. During the winter of 1999-2000 I began following my first off-season training plan which involved weight lifting, high school swim team, skiing on the weekends, and base building endurance work on the bike weather permitting. By spring I was training on my bike 5 or 6 days a week and planning out a race season that would stretch 6 months, from April through October. Spring of 2000 started with a bang, and kept up throughout the summer and fall. I raced almost every weekend and won most of the races I entered. Things were going very well, and when the season ended I was very motivated to crack down even harder and get started as soon as possible getting ready for the 2001 season.
Going into my senior year of high school I quit swim team so I could focus on riding my bike. I didn’t ski as much, and I didn’t spend as much time lifting weights. I had really enjoyed orchestra club through middle and high school but I quit that too thinking it would get in the way of training. I only took a few weeks off the bike between the last race of the season and starting my base miles to get ready for the next. Together with my coach we decided to ramp up the volume. I self flagellated, forcing myself to put in base mile rides in December and January and coming home in the dark, freezing cold and shivering. In 2000 I spent on average 7-10 hours a week on the bike, and didn’t start structured training on the bike until ski season was over in April. By early spring 2001 16-18 hour training weeks were the norm. My senior year of high school if I wasn’t at school I was on my bike. I felt fit and confident coming into spring – I already had several thousand base miles under my belt, and had an early season win at the Iron Horse XC race in Durango in May. I missed my high school graduation to go to Big Bear, California to race at a national championships series in early June and barely finished in the top third. Pack fodder. My season unraveled from there. That win at Iron Horse was the last podium I would stand on until fall of 2004, my senior year of college. I trained harder. I did more intervals and more races and more long rides. My first season out of the juniors and into the U-23s in 2002 was mostly disappointing. 2003 wasn’t much better. I was working with a new coach in college but was only selectively absorbing bits and pieces of what they were trying to teach me. I was very certain that I knew what was best for me and that more of what I had been doing was the answer. More racing, more hard intervals, more long endurance rides.
Surprisingly I didn’t quit and walk away from the sport. Many people would have. Experiencing so much success and then working even harder only to have it denied was maddening. All the traps were avoidable, but I fell into so many of them. Ultimately the pitfalls I fell into were of my own doing, but with better coaching early in my racing career I could’ve learned these lessons easier and faster. My 2000 season felt so successful largely because my momentum kept building. Winning was fun and I kept winning. Riding my bike felt easy and natural. I would race on weekends and do a few fun, low key rides during the week. I had other interests and other sports that I was still doing. I didn’t realize it at the time, but the formula that was helping me progress so much was that my life was pretty balanced between biking, school, a part time job, and other hobbies. Intense racing once a week wasn’t stretching my bandwidth.
In late fall of 2000 my coach and I made the error of assuming that I had enough experience and maturity to start a ‘pro-light’ training approach. All my goals were based around race results that I wanted the following season. That was an even bigger error. I was basically given a program that was 75% the workload of what top pro mountain bike racers were doing. Our thinking went, I want to be a pro so I need to start training like a pro, even though I’ve only been racing for a few years, there are still lots of holes in my skills and fitness, and I’m still a teenager. In some ways I probably was ready to engage with higher training demands, but at the time I did not understand how all the other pieces of my life would have to change to accommodate this. 17 year old me was still a full time student, I didn’t sleep or rest enough, I ate candy and processed foods and thought nothing of it. I did dumb, reckless stuff with my friends. My lifestyle choices didn’t improve in college. Add alcohol and occasional recreational drugs to the mix, parties, girls, all nighters, a much more academically demanding environment than high school, and it’s no surprise that my training suffered. It took me years to understand that training is not just something that happens on the bike, it is the culmination of all the choices, decisions, and sacrifices we make on a daily basis. Starting the ‘pro-light’ training program at 22 would have made a lot of sense. Starting it at 17 was a mistake.
So how would I approach training my younger self knowing what I do now? Young Petey wasn’t great at receiving advice from ‘old’ people so I would carefully consider some questions that would pique his interest.
-Where do you see this sport taking you in 5 years? In 10? Do you think you’ll still be doing it when you’re old? If you become a pro racer what will you want to do when your racing career is over?
-What is the most enjoyable part of mountain biking for you? Racing? Winning? Being competitive? Feeling really competent when you execute a skill well? Being in nature with your friends and family? Do you think that what you enjoy most about it at 17 will change as you get older? How so?
-If you had to choose, would you rather win a big important race now, like a national championship, knowing that you will burn out and be done with the sport in your 20’s, or never race again but know that you will enjoy riding mountain bikes together often with your future partners/wife?
-Would you rather win a big race even if it didn’t end up being that hard for you, or eventually develop a skill on your bike that took you a very long time and a lot of hard work to practice and perfect?
-What is the best part of winning for you? The sense of accomplishment? The accolades? The bragging? The growing trophy case and medals? A feeling of mastery? The hard work it takes?
-What is the worst part of performing poorly?
-Do you think it is possible to balance your love of mountain biking with another sport? Is it possible to excel at two or more sports at the same time?
-What are your favorite and least favorite workouts in your training program?
-You will be starting college next year, is the thing you’re most excited about collegiate racing and being on the cycling team? What else about the college experience are you excited about?
-Does it feel hard or like a sacrifice to go to bed earlier or have more discipline regarding what you eat? Do you think the quality of your training and racing would improve if you slept more and ate less sugar? What are you willing to sacrifice in order to improve? What are you not willing to give up?
Any parent, teacher, or coach will tell you that getting through to teenagers is tough, but if we choose to coach junior athletes that is our task. It is often easy to see what they could be doing better; the challenge is communicating that information in a way that they are receptive to hearing. I began my coaching career in 2016 working with a group of very talented high school boys very similar to myself at that age. Seeing the ways that they could improve their training or refine their bike handling skills was rarely the problem. Getting them to listen and absorb what their coaches had to say was difficult. Giving them advice usually fell on deaf ears, asking them questions that encourage introspection sometimes worked. A coach is not responsible for the trajectory a junior athlete takes, but a good coach will always be focused on ways to communicate with them effectively, reigning in impulsive and immature tendencies, erring on the side of less volume, intensity, and workout specificity to make sure it is always fun, be vigilant towards signs of burnout and overtraining, and of course emphasizing process based goals over outcome based goals. These are the keystones to fostering longevity and growth in young athletes.
Just like adults there is a huge amount of variability in the way juniors respond to training stimuli and handle racing stress, so there is no prescription, or hard rules that they should follow. However there are some guidelines that would be wise to follow in coaching most junior athletes.
-Schedule two complete rest days per week into their training program
-Keep volume to 10 hours per week or less, obligations like school and family life are more important
-Continue training with a second sport and do not let mountain biking cut into their other hobbies
-Emphasize improving diet and sleep hygiene and how this helps improve the quality of their workouts
-Keep workouts relatively simple and fun, 2-3 structured workouts per week is plenty
-Help them see the benefits of process goals vs. outcome goals
-Ask questions that encourage introspection, they are not mini-adults, tendency to ignore adults
-For the junior who wants to race a lot encourage them to take two weeks off the bike mid season
-Do not prescribe lots of base miles and endurance training during the winter months
-By 16 or 17 most young athletes are physically ready to do moderately hard weight lifting
-Keep a close eye on group dynamics in settings like NICA programs, can increase risk of burnout
-Most juniors will benefit from keeping racing low pressure, especially if they like to race frequently
-In group settings like NICA programs discourage athletes from comparing themselves to their peers
-Children lack perspective, rebounding from setbacks is harder and more emotional for them
-You are not a cheerleader, but at the same time kids need more emotional support than adult athletes
I was very lucky to receive very high quality coaching at the end of my collegiate cycling career and into my mid 20’s when I stayed very focused on racing and training, and in retrospect the sub-par level of coaching that I received as a teenager provided some valuable life lessons to me that have influenced the way I approach coaching juniors today. My best biking friends in high school and college have long since walked away from the sport. My most serious rival and friend won a collegiate national championship short track cross country title in 2004 and today doesn’t own a mountain bike. The problem of burnout for young athletes is a serious one. Just as a seedling is more fragile than an oak tree so too junior athletes are more fragile than adults. When working with young and developing athletes the gifted coach will always keep this reality front and center in their coaching philosophy.